OT: Sound familiar?

In that it's the usual psychological blather, inventing categories and inventing stories, yes, it is familiar.

:) AIUI the goal is to declare everyone a mentally ill customer. Nevertheless the 3rd one fits a recurring issue we have here.

NT

People seem to be happiest, and most productive, when they are more concerned with things (ie, electronics) than feelings.

Psychology is an important, and usually ignored, element of design. Optimization here consists mostly of keeping feelings from blocking serious thought. And setting up an environment for creativity.

Psychologists don't often think in those terms; some should. I could imagine bigger companies having a psychology staff specifically to nuture creativity. I don't know of any that do. The pay would be a lot better than the usual family-disputes-and-neurosis practice.

I'm pretty sure if any company did that the engineers would sneer at them or quit. Do psych types understand things like creativity, satisfaction, fulfilment, competition, risk etc?

NT

Psychologists should certainly be good enough to prevent that from happening.

Some should learn. As I said, the pay would be a lot better.

There have been a few books about the psychology of design. The Psychology of Computer Programming; The Soul of a New Machine; Showstopper; Deaming in Code; Coders at Work. Mostly about software.

and

rtheless the 3rd one fits a recurring issue we have here.

m or quit.

nt, competition, risk etc?

"The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder

wasn't primarily about psychology - it was essentially a narrative about a particular development project. Because it was a book about a particular de velopment and a particular development team it showscases a particular psyc hological situation.

In reality the creative process varies at least as much as the people who d o the creation, and organisational environment in which the creation goes o n also plays its part.

I haven't read any of the other books that John Larkin lists - there are we ll known psychological tricks in programming, like keep all procedures shor t enough to fit one side of one sheet of A4, and break them up into smaller procedures if they won't - but this hasn't got a lot to do with the psycho logy of programming, and quite a lot to do with the practicalities of hiera rchical design.

Another good book, not specifically about psychology, but certainly touching on it, is Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man Month. I wish it had more historical tidbits about the development of the operating system of the IBM

Jon

Jim Williams' two books on analog design are great. He got a bunch of expert/famous guys to each write a chapter. They are mostly technical and only touch on the psychological aspects of design. The Barrie Gilbert essay is maybe the best there.

Music works best.

Current song: Van Morrison - Wavelength

http://148.163.81.10:8006

(Zenith Classic Rock net station based in Ireland) Best classic '60s, '70s, and some '80s rock.

Whole album sides. It is a really good station.

Check out the Emerson Pugh book, "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems",

Really a good read. The others in the series are also good, especially "IBM's Early Computers", .

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(Who wasn't there at the time, but knew some of the folks in the books)

It took IBM a long time to decide that they weren't in the adding machine business, ie, that computers could work in binary.

Never been on a date with anyone female that went anything like these examples. In the US at least you do often encounter people on first dates and otherwise that enjoy primarily talking about themselves, and after about 30 minutes of that you start to feel like you're the audience and maybe you don't need to be there at all. That doesn't necessarily mean they have a "disorder."

But all pop-psych articles that tell you you can amateur-diagnose personality disorders on a first date or something are probably bunkum. About all you can tell for sure is who you'd rather not go on another date with.

There are two types of people in the world, people who let emotion influence many of their decisions and people who kid themselves.

I keep waiting for one of the new machine-learning/AI pioneers to write a book called "The Machine of a New Soul" :)

Clifford Heath

I listened to a sam harris podcast with Eliezer Yudkowsky about AI. Interesting. And I hadn't heard about Alpha zero.

(And then a geeking chess guy explaining what a cool win alphazero had over stockfish... )

George H.

When a pitcher keeps throwing left, he can deliberately aim a little right to compensate. Similarly, we can *rationally* manipulate our emotions to compensate for biases and blind spots.

Presumably reasoning is what distinguishes humans from flatworms.

of course, and that's one of the major errors of psych practice.

1. list behaviours that have any correlation with condition
2. diagnose anyone with 3 of those as having the condition.
3. Leave fact, sense & logic at the door.
4. Get paid

NT

That's an exxageration for satirical effect.

It can be argued that nobody in their right mind takes up pschiatry. My psy chiatrist cousin got into it by doing a Ph.D. on using lithium to treat man ic-depressives (which works, but patients really don't like losing the mani c phase) and moved on to looking after elderly people whose minds are faili ng, which is also a perfectly respectable activity.

That's what distiguishes the professional from the amateur. If you don't ge t paid, you can't do wherever you do full-time.

Professional psychiatrists aren't allowed to express an opinion on the ment al state of anybody they haven't encountered in a professional situation - which might not last as long a successful first date, but does involve a si gnificant interaction which designed to let the psychiatrist to get some in sight into the patients mental state.

And you can be wrong about that.

..and Trump fits the first type and the last type.